Tim Worstall

Diabetes epidemic affecting 350m – and western fast food is to blame See, it’s all hamburgers I tell you! A few paras down: Researchers also say that increased life expectancy is playing a major role. Ah, so maybe it’s not just hamburgers then? As to the causes, the team attribute 70% to ageing and 30% [...]

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At the ASI.

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Ed Miliband may lack instant charisma, but voters value decency Oh, do they? A leader facing bad personal polls and even worse ratings for public trust in his party to run the economy might panic. No, apparently they don’t.

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At Glastonbury: One of the campaign group members said: “That was totally over the top. He threatened to hit me.” It’s what bouncers do with unruly members of the crowd mate.

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It ought to be obvious, beyond remarking, that a woman should be able to sleep with whom she wants, when she wants, as often as she wants, without danger and without shame. Yes, I’d like a pony too. The bit that seems to have been left out is “with those who would like to sleep [...]

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A piece about food stamps. The US program which gives poor people vouchers to purchase food. It’s all about how what bastards the right are for thinking to cut this program. You know what’s actually missing from it? A discussion of how the program has been expanded in recent years. There might well be a [...]

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I’m looking for the people who mine/export columbite and tantalite from Madagascar. This post is something of a hope: maybe someone will find it via Google, someone who is in that industry. If you are one of those people that either mines or exports the two minerals, columbite and tantalite, from Madagascar, then could you [...]

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Quelle surprise, eh? Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term “Plutonomy” in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia. In a series of research [...]

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Curing diabetes (type 2) with an 8 week diet. The volunteers were closely supervised by a medical team and matched with the same number of volunteers with diabetes who did not get the special diet. After just one week into the study, the pre-breakfast blood sugar levels of the study group had returned to normal. [...]

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Ritchie points us to this article: Britain’s largest companies are in dispute with HM Revenue & Customs over paying £25bn worth of tax, according to the latest official figures. The money, if collected, would go a long way to helping the government’s parlous financial state and is, for example, roughly equivalent to the size of [...]

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The Koch brothers fund everything that’s naughty, not nice, in American politics. The investigation revealed Koch-supported policy fixes, and specific language repeated across each document, such as raising the retirement age…. Brad DeLong is now funded and directed by the Kochs? Wow, I never knew: although I did know that DeLong has been saying that [...]

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Jürgen Habermas (German philosopher) tell us that the euro is all a problem of short term politics and we need the politicians to stand up and think of the long term: We call on Europe’s leaders to take over the political agenda again and develop a new plan for the future of a prosperous and [...]

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Private hospitals are no place for people with learning disabilities The sickening abuse at Winterbourne View hospital in Bristol, revealed by Panorama, shows why such private hospitals should no longer exist, say leading figures in learning disability sector That’s not in fact what the campaigners’ letter says. The emphasis is not on the “private”. For [...]

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My new time machine. Set it for 5 minutes in the past.

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But nothign else pensions do creates jobs – or manufacturing or anything else. Credit does that – and Davis shows himself to be economically ignorant (sorry to be so blunt – but it seems like a statement of truth to me) to argue otherwsie. No wonder we have no manufacturing then – we’re clueless about [...]

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And this time we will need to reconvene Bretton Woods. The challenge we face is as big as that in 1944: we have a broken system and a need to build afresh. We have to ensure we get it right. The re-emergence of neoliberalism so soon after 2008 has plunged us into the current crisis. Surely [...]

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The economy started to recover from the recession in the last quarter of 2009. This recovery had nothing to do with the cuts, because they had not happened. The two most likely causes were the 21% depreciation of sterling against competitor currencies, and a £200bn injection of cash into the banking system, starting in February [...]

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What decline? The bestselling shop-bought pizza in Italy, and indeed in 33 other countries around the world including Britain, is made by a German-owned food company on an industrial estate just off the M6 in Leyland, Lancashire. Sure, it’s not a Morris Minor we’re manufacturing, but manufacturing it is.

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